


Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

by medjc



Series: Tumblr Requests [3]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Love Confessions, Post-Canon, Tumblr Prompt, it's a double meaning thing, sssorta, u know how it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-18 05:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16111355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/medjc/pseuds/medjc
Summary: “You coming?” she asks.“What— you mean— inthere?” He blinks at her a few times, incredulous. “Just what in the hell could be in some— some dark, creepy cave that you think I would want to see?”He doesn’t know how he expected her to respond to that, but it definitely wasn’t a long, drawn-out sigh followed shortly by a curt, “Worms.”He. Just.What.





	Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

After about the fifth time Rhys trips over a vine as he and Fiona make their way down this shitty, overgrown path, he’s really starting to wonder if spending his Saturday up to eyeballs in paperwork would have been the better choice after all.

“I can’t believe,” he’s saying, out of breath from trying to dodge to worst of the roots they’re walking over and keeping pace with Fiona at the same time. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this. You said it would be _fun_.”

She spares a look over her shoulder, clearly amused from how much trouble he’s having with the maze of flora. How in the hell she can just shoulder through it all like it’s nothing, he can’t even begin to guess.

“You’re not having fun?” she teases as she turns to face forwards again.

Momentarily taking his eyes off the ground to scowl spitefully at the back of her head, he winds up nearly falling flat on his face. Again. “Oh, yeah, totally. Just— Just a blast.”

He doesn’t even know what they’re supposed to be doing out here. Fiona wouldn’t give him a straight answer, she just kept saying there was something she found while out checking a lead and she wanted to show it to him. And for some reason, he agreed, even though the last time she came stomping into his office like that—just... all covered in dirt and blood he couldn’t be sure was hers or someone else’s—she gave him an encrypted hard drive that she needed him to extract coordinates off of. Which was fine, and he was happy to do it up until some Vault Hunters of the very unfriendly variety showed up on his doorstep the next day waving their guns around like a bunch of jackasses and demanding to get their hard-earned data back.

Because unlike a certain someone, some people have to work hard for their intel. So it only makes sense they’d be pissed when they get conned out of it, or whatever it is just gets straight up stolen. He’s not all that familiar with her methods concerning these things, actually, and he’s not sure he wants to be. Plausible deniability and all that.

Fiona suddenly veers off the main trail onto an even shittier and more overgrown one, vegetation crowded so densely together now that even she has to be a little more careful picking her way through the brush. Rhys halts abruptly at the fork, staring after her in distress until she realizes he’s not following her anymore and turns around curiously.

“Oh, come onnn,” she whines, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “You can’t tap out now! We’re almost there, I promise.”

He has to stop himself from rolling his eyes. She’s been saying that for the past... forty-five minutes? At least? “You know, when you came barging in with security on your tail before I’d even finished my coffee, I sort of expected whatever wacky adventure you had in store for me this time would be a little more, uh, I don’t know, exciting? Or at least not just... trudging through the jungly pits of hell all morning.”

She shrugs as he slowly tiptoes his way towards her, the corner of her mouth twisting up into a lopsided smirk. “I told you to wear your walking shoes.”

“You know damn well I don’t have walking shoes,” he retorts as he struggles to tug his ankle from where it’s gotten caught on a particularly troublesome vine. “And also, now that I’m thinking about it again, I really wish you would stop scaring the crap out of my guards. I don’t pay them enough to deal with you setting off the alarms every single time you decide to drop in unannounced.”

He loses his balance once he finally yanks his foot free, but Fiona is close enough to catch him by the shoulders so he doesn’t wind up eating dirt.

“Maybe you should pay them more, then,” she tells him, hands lingering on his arms for a moment before sliding down to pat him once on his elbows. “Just a thought.”

Scoffing at the suggestion, Rhys folds his arms over his chest. “Ooor you could check in with security like everyone else? You’re in the system now, Fi. There’s literally no reason for you to be doing this whole...” He gestures vaguely at the entirety of her. “...cloak and dagger thing. Sneaking around like— like—”

“But sneaking around is _fun_ ,” she interrupts before he can think of an appropriate analogy, turning on her heel to continue leading the way through the thicket. “Lighten up a little, won’t you? No one likes a stick in the mud.”

“Well, you obviously do, since you keep breaking into my facility just to hang out with me.”

She snorts, shaking her head as they both duck under a low-hanging branch and edge around a spiky bush that would probably be really painful to fall into. “I don’t break in _just_ to hang out. It’s for work stuff. Well, you know, most of the time.”

“Right.” He nods. “Work stuff. Which apparently includes sticking around for most of the day after I’ve already given you what you want and using my desk as your own personal lounge chair. And also stealing pieces of my lunch when you think I’m not looking.”

She glances back at him, one eyebrow raised. “Are you saying you don’t enjoy our time together?”

He does. Probably a lot more than he should. “I’m _saying_ that when I have stuff I need to do, you can be very, uh. Distracting. That’s all.”

She makes a thoughtful sound at that but doesn’t say anything else, the conversation lulling back into relative silence as they maneuver through the underbrush. It’s hot today— well, it’s hot every day, but it’s also _humid_ , so humid that he’s having a hard time judging how much of the moisture clinging to his skin is from the air and how much of it is sweat. The leafy canopy above their heads casts most of the ground in shade, which helps some, but there’s not much of a breeze to break up the stifling heat because of how tightly packed together the trees are. Even after tugging his coat off so he can roll up his sleeves, it’s still almost unbearably warm.

When they finally emerge from the trees into a long, wide clearing at the foot of a cliff face, Rhys can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. Because surely this has to be the end of their miserable hike through the wilderness, right? There’s a shallow stream cutting through the middle of the glade, running off between the trees in one direction and leading to the mouth of a cave in the stone wall of the ravine in the other. But other than that, there’s nowhere else to go.

“Well!” he says with a huff, scratching at the back of his head. “This was... great and all, really, and as much as I love getting dragged out to the ass-end of nowhere for no good reason—”

Fiona’s not listening. She only turns around once she’s standing in front of that cave, resting one hand on her hip and tilting her head to the side.

“You coming?” she asks.

“What— you mean— in _there_?” He blinks at her a few times, incredulous. “Just what in the hell could be in some— some dark, creepy cave that you think I would want to see?”

He doesn’t know how he expected her to respond to that, but it definitely wasn’t a long, drawn-out sigh followed shortly by a curt, “Worms.”

He. Just.

What.

“You, uh... You want to show me... worms?”

She throws her hands up, like he’s ridiculous for even questioning it. “Do you trust me?”

He regards her suspiciously for a moment. “The fact that you’re asking me that _now_ makes me think I shouldn’t.”

They have a brief but very dramatic staring contest before Fiona spins back around with a huff. “Whatever. I’m going in. Stay out here if you want to, but it’s your loss.”

His... His _loss_?

“I don’t— What exactly is it that I have to lose here?” he wonders as she disappears into the cave, and he has to jog to catch up with her. “Because I, uh, hate to break it to you, but I’ve seen a worm before. Lots, actually. And they’re really not that interesting.”

She ignores him in favor of moving further down the tunnel, being extra careful on the misty slope of the stream running down the middle of their path. Shaking his head and resigning himself to whatever worm-related experience he’s about to have, Rhys activates his palm interface so they can at least see where they’re going. Slipping and dying of blunt force trauma to the head would put a real damper on his schedule. Plus it would suck, like, just in general.

But it very nearly happens anyway, because Fiona whirls around and actually pounces on him, hands grabbing for his in an attempt to smother the light.

“What are you _doing_?” she hisses, frowning up at him like she just watched him kick a puppy. “Turn it off, you dope!”

“What are you— Will you just—” He yanks his arm back with a scoff, shining the light right in her eyes so she’s forced to stop invading his bubble and shield her face instead. “I’m not turning anything off! I’d like to see more than about a foot in front of me, if that’s alright with you.”

She makes this face that’s somewhere between a glower and a pout, reaching out to smack his wrist away so she can glare up at him properly. “You’re going to scare them.”

“Scare... who? The worms?”

It’s a joke, and not a very good one at that, but she actually nods with such a serious expression that he heaves a sigh and lets his palm interface deactivate. Unbelievable. She must have hit her head pretty hard during her last mission out because as far as he knows, worms don’t get scared. Although he wouldn’t consider himself to be an expert on all things worm, so hell, maybe they do, but how would a person ever know? Either way, he gets the feeling that he definitely shouldn’t be enabling this.

“Fine,” he grumbles anyway, despite his better judgement. Everything in front of them gets swallowed up by shadow again, the sunlight spilling in from the mouth of the cave only barely reaching to where they’re standing. “If I fall and crack my skull open on a rock or something, though, it’s all on you.”

“I can live with that,” she tells him cheekily as she takes a half step closer, hesitating for a beat before gently taking his left hand and sliding her fingers between his. “But you shouldn’t worry about it too much. I won’t let you fall.”

A weak, “Uh-huh,” is all he can manage as she starts pulling him down the damp passageway, too distracted by the heat of her calloused skin against his to push the issue. Which, come to think of it, isn’t that much of an issue. He’s completely fine with it, actually. Maybe even more than fine. Like, okay, he literally could not be more fine with it even if he wanted to be. And his sudden change of heart has absolutely nothing to do with how she’s idly rubbing her thumb over his, or how she squeezes his fingers reassuringly every time he stumbles over the uneven terrain beneath their feet. Nope. Definitely not.

As they make their way down the slippery tunnel, the limited light filtering in through the entrance to the cave gradually fades into near pitch-blackness. It’s a lot cooler in here than it was outside, turning the sweat slaked across his skin so cold that he starts to shiver. Fiona’s hand is still warm and comforting in his, though, grip firm and making sure they stay close to the cave wall so neither one of them winds up losing their footing on the bank of the steadily widening stream.

It doesn’t stay dark much longer, however, the space around them slowly brightening back up with soft, bluish light coming from straight ahead. Which strikes him as odd, considering how deep inside this cave system they must be by now. If anything, it should be getting _darker_. But he doesn’t get to mull it over enough to draw his own conclusions; once they duck underneath a lower hanging portion of the rock above their heads, the passage opens up all at once into a large cavern before them, and the mystery pretty much solves itself.

Interspersed between jagged stalactites and nestled into nearly every nook and cranny of the ceiling are little spotlights of color, gently glowing blue and casting long shadows across the ground towards them. Long, silvery threads hang around each one, not luminescent themselves but reflective of the light around them. There’s so many that the silky webs seem to crowd and overlap each other, string after string of translucent beads suspended from the rock and draped in crescents across the entire width of the room.

“Oh,” Rhys breathes with belated realization, staring up at the intricate nests in awe. “Worms.”

Fiona spares him an amused look, leading him towards the wall by entrance to the tunnel they just came through before releasing his hand and sliding down to sit on the ground. “Told you.”

He takes a seat next to her, being careful to stay extra quiet. Yeah, he guesses she did. But when she said _worms_ , he sort of expected the garden variety, like the little guys he finds out on the sidewalk whenever it rains. Not... something straight out of National Geographic.

She probably let him believe that on purpose. Dramatic effect or whatever. Sneaky.

“How did you find this?” he asks her in a hushed voice, still watching the ceiling and the reflection of the lights in the water, faint ripples disturbing the surface of the large pool and splashing softly at the shore.

Making herself more comfortable against the wall behind them, Fiona folds her hands in her lap and crosses her legs at the ankles. “That hard drive I gave you was supposed to have the locations of some old ECHO recorders that used to belong to a bunch of Vault Hunters. A ragtag group of guys that were waaay in over their heads. Got taken out a couple months ago for pissing off the wrong people. But word was, they’d somehow managed to find a solid lead on a new key. Or at least a piece of a new key. Probably a dead end, but I figured I might as well check it out.”

She jerks her head over towards the far end of the chamber where a small, metal chest is partially hidden between two stalagmites, clearly having already been tampered with. And then she looks back over at him, giving him a dry smile. “Booby-trapped. Which I expected. And there wasn’t even anything in there worth the trip out, other than a really disappointing stack of cash and a couple shitty pistols.”

“And the ECHO?”

She shrugs heavily, facing forward again. “Already gone. If it was ever really there to begin with.”

They lapse back into a comfortable silence for a minute or two, both content to observe the phenomenon above their heads. It’s like looking up at the stars, like the wires of this universe these things have made for themselves have been etched into the cracks in the stone. He wonders just how often Fiona finds things like this; if she stumbles across little pockets of magic so often that it jades her or if it can still take her by surprise. There are times where he doesn’t hear from her for weeks at a time, the call of adventure leading her so far away that sometimes he worries he might never see her again. He can’t even begin to imagine the types of things she sees. The types of places she goes.

But she does come back, eventually. She always does. With scrapes and bruises, sure—one time even with two bullets in her shoulder and a broken tailbone—but with stories too. Tales so tall that it’s nearly impossible to pick out the snippets of truth from the embellishments, so he’s long since stopped trying. But she always tells them with this longing in her eyes, and he never knows if it’s because she misses being out there in the thick of things or because she wishes she could stay.

“They’re not even really worms, you know,” she suddenly tells him, shaking him from his reverie. He looks to her in confusion and she gestures up at the twinkling insects above them. “This is just a larval stage. They turn into these mosquito looking things and only live a few days at most, so their sole purpose is basically just to reproduce and die.”

He makes a thoughtful noise at that. “Just like real life.”

She laughs quietly, shaking her head and smacking him gently on the arm. “Don’t be such a fatalistic ass. I didn’t bring you out here to debate entropy.”

“Is that so?” He looks at her then, at the way teal light falls across her face, at the smile that lingers on her lips. “I can’t think of any other reason why we’d hike an hour and a half through the jungle just to look at some freaky not-worms, so. Care to share with the rest of the class what the purpose of this field trip was?”

Her gaze meets his for one long moment, expression light but with a twist of... something else. Something earnest but hesitant, like she’s holding something back. And before he can put his finger on what it is, she looks away, up at the ceiling, heaving a small sigh and crossing her ankles the other way.

“When I was a kid,” she starts slowly, “I found a place like this one. Or, well, I fell into a place like this one. On accident.”

Rhys raises an eyebrow. “On accident?”

“There’s this entire system of hidden tunnels and old passageways no one uses anymore in Hollow Point,” she explains. “People don’t go back there unless they have a really good reason to because of all the spooky stories about them. Urban legends, mostly.”

“Urban legends? Like... Mothman?”

She gives him this really flat look. “No, not like Mothman. Everyone knows Mothman isn’t real.”

Shrugging with one shoulder, Rhys crosses his arms in front of him defensively. “I mean, he could be. There’s no solid evidence proving he’s _not_.”

Fiona very obviously tries not to roll her eyes. “Most of ours aren’t even that creative. Like... the one that pretty much everyone knows is that there’s a bunch of huge snake monsters slithering around back there, just lying in wait for some dumbass to wander too far down the wrong tunnel. Some of them supposedly spit acid too.”

“Snake monsters?” he repeats dubiously. “What, they couldn’t come up with anything better than just... oversized reptiles?”

“Apparently not. But the target audience for that particular myth is pretty young, so I don’t think a lot of effort went into it. Most people don’t really want their kids messing around in creepy back tunnels and snakes are scary enough to make most under-twelves stay away. Except, of course, yours truly.”

“Ah. Right.”

There’s a brief lull in the conversation and Rhys looks over to find she’s still staring up at the shimmering lights above them, picking at the polish on her nails in thought. After a minute, though, she seems to come back, shaking her head to herself and refolding her hands in her lap before beginning to speak again.

“So I was back in those tunnels one day—by myself since Sasha was always too scared to come with me—and it was the usual routine of picking through the trash people threw back there for anything valuable, exploring to sate my own curiosity, you know, that sort of thing. And out of nowhere my foot gets stuck in a bunch of rocks. Like, really stuck. I nearly broke my ankle trying to pull it out. I remember thinking how I was going to die down there without ever doing a single cool thing in the entire ten years of my life.”

He can’t help but laugh quietly at that mental image, even though it probably wasn’t very funny at the time. “So... that’s why you throw yourself headfirst into danger like it’s a sport, then? To overcompensate for this one traumatic experience you had when you were ten?”

“Hey, if I have to die young, I’d rather go out with a bang,” she says with a shrug. “Starving to death because I got stuck under a rock is a pretty lame way to kick the bucket, if you ask me.”

“I mean... I thought the point here was to _not_ get overly existential, but I guess?”

She glances over long enough to stick her tongue out at him, nudging her shoulder against his. “Well, anyway, I obviously didn’t die. The ground wound up collapsing beneath me and I slid down into some cavern that must have gotten sealed off at some point. And it looked a lot like this.”

Nodding up towards the glow worms above them, she pulls her legs up to sit cross legged and rest her elbows on her knees. “It sort of became this place where I could go and just... be alone for a while. Not a lot of people went back into those tunnels, but the entrance was pretty hard to find anyway, so no one else ever found it. And it was quiet back there— nobody yelling or shooting at each other or trying to steal the food me and Sasha managed to scrape together for ourselves. It was just... it was _my_ spot, you know? I never even showed Sasha because something about it was just... special.”

Fiona goes quiet for a moment as she absently runs a finger through the dirt caked onto the heel of her boot before huffing out a small laugh that sounds more sad than amused. “And then one day I went down there and they were all gone. Just like that. I still don’t know what happened. I used to check every now and then to see if maybe they’d come back, but they never did. So it didn’t really feel like my spot anymore. It was just... a cave.”

She takes a deep breath and holds it for a second before blowing it all back out. “But it was a long time ago. I’d actually kind of forgotten about the whole thing until I found this place. And my first thought when I saw all this—besides the sudden and intense fear that I’d somehow wind up getting my foot stuck under a rock again—was that I... I really...”

She trails off, wringing her hands around in her lap. And then she looks at him, _really_ looks at him, her wistful half-smile curving into something so soft and heartfelt that he feels like he finally knows what they’ve both been trying to say for so long but haven’t had the courage to until just now.

“I wanted to show it to you,” she tells him, voice barely above a whisper but he can still feel the meaning behind her words in his bones. “Before they just... disappear.”

He leans forward, reaching out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear and trail his fingers down her cheek. “Well, I’m, uh. I’m glad you did.”

He doesn’t know when it is that they started loving each other. It’s not something he can see as having a definite beginning, because nothing with them is ever that simple. Being around her—being _with_ her—is always so complicated, but at the same time, it’s the easiest thing he’s ever had to do. They fight too much and yell too loud and spend too much time apart, but there’s always this gentle calling to pull them back into orbit when they start straying off the path they share. Not because they have to, not anymore. They have a choice now and every single time, they choose each other.

So. Maybe it doesn’t matter when it happened, exactly. Just... that it did.

Fiona is the first to look away. Maybe out of uncertainty, maybe out of fear of the unknown, maybe out of something else entirely. And that’s okay, he thinks, because they still have a lot of things to figure out. He’s not sure if they’ll ever be _done_ figuring things out, but it just wouldn’t be them if they didn’t have to wing it half the time, would it? She tilts her head back to gaze up at the ceiling again, leaning back on her palms and letting the soft blue light from above wash over her.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks him.

He doesn’t take his eyes off of her for one moment as he answers, “Yeah. It is.”

**Author's Note:**

> Another old Tumblr request from back in April! Anon wanted sweet love confessions and I wanted to write about worms so I compromised and did both. Everybody's happy.


End file.
